Distinct

Though I originally hard-coded the message types (as they do not change very often, and are meaningless without other code changes anyway), I figured I would test dynamically gathering the distinct types. MongoDb supports the distinct function. From the MongoDB console:

Though I saw distinct in MongoMapper, I had trouble getting it to work (this is an older app on <v2.0, method missing error).

However, a very powerful technique within MongoMapper worked just perfect! Essentially, every collection in MongoMapper will return itself as a collection that MongoDB understands (in their db.collection.blah format) — helps when you need to execute MongoDB style commands:

Map-Reduce Too Slow

In this instance, it turned out that Map-Reduce was significantly slower, and I am not exactly sure why. Other than I suppose that iterating over each document is more expensive than calling count with a filter on the event_type key (which is covered by an index).